I took a bit of a break from brainstorming for this project to work on a few other projects, including a couple of months on clean-up for our GGJ26 project, a personality quiz game, and some travel.
Once we wrapped up those projects and took a break, I slowly transitioned back into working on The Note Competition remake... which we're still figuring out a name for. Right now the code name is "WING Competition", but we may need to workshop it a bit more. I was still just working on this on and off while things have been busy the past few months, so this post will have a variety of small things working up to the bigger project.
To start back in, I was thinking about some of the expenses and marketing side of things. I was thinking about us making some social media posts, so I started making some accounts and things to prepare. With that, we decided we might want to redo our logo for The Gek Games. Right now it looks a little too similar to The Nays because we're using that same drawing of The Gek. So to make it a little different, I sketched a few thumbnail ideas for logo concepts.
I took some of those sketchbook drawings into Photoshop and started to turn them into digital versions. These were really rough, but I wanted to figure out the overall layout/feel before I got too far. Some of the designs I liked more originally ended up looking a little busy when I turned them to digital.
Then I took the bottom-right one and cleaned it up a bit and then tried out a few fonts. I was leaning towards the bottom-left but still wasn't sure if it's too busy.
I analyzed other game studio logos and decided to try one that's a bit more simplified with less going on so it could be a bit cleaner and easier to read. So this is what I ended up with for now!
I also started going through the process of making our Steam account! Since it requires many days to verify and have everything go through, I wanted to get that all set up early on so we could start testing the Steamworks SDK while we're developing the game. So I got our account all set up and verified so we officially have access to Steamworks.
Then, because of some of the things I learned from our GGJ26 project, I made a couple of spreadsheets to just organize our information like characters in the database and pictures used. It was honestly pretty refreshing to look back at this project after our intensive GGJ project this year because I set everything up not on a time crunch, so the project files and events were a lot more organized and well-documented. It's also a lot less complicated so far.
I also decided to dive into Steam integration more with some RPG Maker plugins. It was a lot of research, but I eventually found out I had to downgrade my NW.js to version 49.1. I found a few plugins that would help with adding Greenworks, but it wasn't until I found Undermax's Steam Link plugin that I was actually able to figure it all out. Their project file was set up with everything needed so I didn't have to go hunt down a lot of external files. And finally, I got something working where I could print the user's name! I still need to try achievements, DLC, and a few other things, but it was a great start to making sure we could get it all working.
Then we spent a whole night doing a brainstorming session! I'd say this was the start of the "official" development for this game. We really honed in on deciding the new theme and idea for the gameplay and overarching story. We bounced ideas around earlier of transitioning it to be about Tag World instead of PS World, but then we thought... what if it was multiple Worlds? So we decided you'd be riding a linkship around Worlds and be competing in some kind of competition across Worlds instead of it all being in Tag World. This could still keep the competition you're competing in as "WING" being the acronym and still make sense. And it allows us to include a lot more unique locations without being tied to Tag World specifically. It could be a few other acronyms like LINK or CIPO also, so we're not sure which one to go with yet.
I spent some time after our brainstorming session organizing all of our notes into a more official Game Design Document. We've been kind of just having a stream of consciousness notes in our document while talking, so I wanted to really hone in and organize our thoughts a bit better so we could have a more clear direction. So I made a new tab for the GDD and started to organize those notes and drop screenshots and images in whenever we referenced something so it'd be easier for us to keep track of and fully flesh out these ideas more.
Since we made an asset list, I started drawing the character sprite for the second playable character, Urom. We compiled a list of inspirations, so I used those as a guide for coming up with a few variations to try things out. I ended up kind of liking the middle one the most since it seems to have the most personality and shapes that fit.
Then I did very quick sketches of all of the characters we had planned. I was mainly trying to get sizes down in relation to each other and based on the middle Urom sprite above so I could try and get those figured out roughly.
I also saved these out as charsets so I could import them directly into the game and get some of those tests there for getting things set up.
Then I started to sketch some of the menu layouts while figuring out what the map layouts could look like. I'm still not sure how the battles are going to look, so we'll have to do a lot of experimenting there.
From there, I wanted to figure out the hub world and some of the basic ideas like challenging the enemy or the VS screen.
I also briefly revisited my debug log plugin because I noticed a couple of bugs with it affecting how you can close the game. So I updated it to allow you to close the game when you're on the title screen or when it's crashing. I also added a new crash report so it'll save a log if the game crashes and print the console error to the log. And it has more information included like the last called event ID and event command and the names of the variables and switches.
I also updated it to add functionality to connect with Google Scripts. This allows us to collect anonymous generic game data such as how long the game was played, what their party was, and if there were any crash errors. And I added a plugin command to call it anywhere in case I ever wanted to get a log at a certain point in the game.
Once I got back from a few trips and busy times, I decided to figure out a rough schedule for the next couple of years. That way, I could have weekly goals that I'm working towards to make sure I know where we're headed on the project. I added some milestone goals for us and deadlines. It's already started to shift quite a bit since I made this and I'm sure it'll continue to as we start working on the mechanics more, but I wanted to get something in there as a starting point so I could better scope and figure out where to start.
And that's where we're at currently! We're still very much in the rough planning stages for this project. Our personal lives have been really busy with work and travel, so that's been delaying progress a bit from our original milestones. But we're not in a huge rush to release this, so if there end up being delays that bump things a bit, I'm not too worried about it.
Our new goal is to officially start full development on this by June, since that's when our life happenings will likely settle down a little bit. At that point, I'm planning to really dedicate a lot more time to it. Until then, I might have a few side project CUPdates in the weeks to come if I'm not working on this quite yet, so stay tuned!
